This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Diné (Navajo) Deities gathers six figures from Navajo religion, most of them tied directly to the emergence narrative in which the Diné ascend through a series of preceding worlds before arriving in this, the Glittering World.
First Man and First Woman are paired throughout the tradition, formed from ears of corn at the close of the underworlds and credited in some tellings with bringing the correct order of ceremony and social life into the present world. Changing Woman is the central creator and nurturing figure of Navajo religion, mother of the Hero Twins, whose own annual renewal from old age back to youth gives Navajo cosmology its central image of cyclical time and is ritually reenacted in the Kinaalda, the Navajo girl's puberty ceremony.
Monster Slayer, the elder of the Hero Twins and son of Changing Woman and the Sun, journeys to his father for weapons of lightning and rids the earth of the monsters threatening the Diné, making the world safe for human life. Talking God is the eastern chief among the Yei, the Navajo Holy People invoked in the Nightway and other major chantway ceremonies, associated with dawn and speech and represented by masked dancers in ceremonial performance.
Coyote, Maii in Navajo, stands apart from the other five as the trickster of the tradition, a chaotic and boundary crossing figure present at key moments of the emergence narrative who introduces disorder, unpredictability and, in several tellings, mortality itself into the created world, genuinely ambivalent rather than a simple villain.